As Lucian K. Truscott says, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that cells in a test tube are a baby and deserve the same rights that a baby has puts Republicans in a real bind.
It does so because it tells us that "pro-life" Republicans have not ever truly meant what they claim to believe, when they say that "life" begins at conception.
Attempting to legislate and impose evangelical "Christians'" religious beliefs on the rest of us is unconstitutional. If only today's GOP truly believed what our Founders did, the U.S. would be in much better shape. The Founders never intended for the U.S. to be an authoritarian theocracy. #1stAmendment#FreedomOfReligion#SeparationOfChurchAndState #ReadForFree
@KathyLK Definitely unconstitutional. But the Constitution is second-level in their authority system, obviously, and many members of their movement want to dismantle democracy in favor oif theocracy, as Jack Posobiec just stated publicly at CPAC.
The logic of the Alabama court ruling is impeccable: if "life" begins at the moment of conception, as "pro-life" Republicans claim to believe, then from the moment ovum and sperm unite, a human being with full personal rights is present. So that the clump of cells in the test tube is a baby….
Obviously many people think this is a ridiculous way to understand the process of human reproduction and fetal development.
For many of us, it's patently absurd to maintain that the test tube contains a baby.
And now that the theocratic Alabama court decision, with its impeccable logic, has put the consequences of saying that the zygote is from the moment of conception a full human person right out on Front St., Republicans want to run from the position they have long defended and wanted to impose on the entire nation in the name of their peculiar religious beliefs.
"The days that Republicans could say they were pro-life and forget about the details are over. It turns out that being anti-abortion wasn’t about the fetus as much as it was about the votes. Today, the anti-abortion movement is all about trying to find a way through the minefield the issue has become for them. Laws about abortion in red states have turned into a pick-your-timeframe smorgasbord."
“Republicans who used to say they are pro-life are all of a sudden for abortion but with caveats. …
The truth is, they don’t believe anything they say about when life begins, or when a fetus becomes a child, or when a legal abortion should suddenly become illegal.Despite the best efforts of Republicans like Mike Johnson to yap about abortion out of one side of their mouths and Jesus out of the other, abortion isn’t about morality, it’s about votes."
@wdlindsy Republicans have never faltered in their mendacious misuse of logic to advance their political power. Unlike most Democrats who put policies forward that can be judged on their merits, Republicans rarely do so because their professed beliefs are nakedly incoherent. I’m happy that this is one of those times they will twist and squirm.
@wdlindsy It doesn’t matter if they only pretend to believe it or if they actually believe it. Sincerity does not make it better. The practical effects of them acting like they believe it are abominable.
@MisuseCase Yes, the effects matter significantly, but I think it's also important, when people claim that they occupy the moral high ground — as Republicans have done for some time now — to assess the sincerity of their claims, since those claims translate into noxious effects.
@wdlindsy #Healthcare in #USA has been politicized and corporatized. Leading to medical debt. This needs to drastically change. Make a true single payer system as in various Western Europe counties. Where women can get access to care without any political or religious interference. Where healthcare for all is affordable and sustained through taxation. And reduce the amount spent on the DoD. Take care of the people first before trying to be world police.
@jadugar63 Indeed. I know the US healthcare system as one of its users, and it's frustrating, confusing, profit-driven, in drastic need of reform. I also spent six years in Canada as a grad student and know that there are viable alternatives to how the US does healthcare coverage, and Americans could learn much from those alternative systems.
@wdlindsy Then there’s the people who can now legitimately claim these embryos as people on their tax returns. It gets more complex if the parents of the embryos divorce -who pays child support? If one or both parents die, are they put up for fostering or adoption? Absolute minefield. They FAFO and deserve all the mess that comes to their door.
@harriettmb Yep. Let that logic lead to the obvious places to which it points, and you end up in nightmare land. Better to have decided from the outset, it seems to me, that equating a zygote with a person is problematic on many leve.s
These are people who don't care about logic or consistency.
Many also believe that poor, non-white or non-Christian aren't worthy of personhood, and given the chance would change the laws to make that official as well.
@wdlindsy These justices probably have no concept of science and have only made their decisions based on their own personal biases from their religious beliefs, morals and taboos coupled with the potential influence and lobbying of the conservative right.
Keep medical decisions out of the courts.
@bouriquet I agree. Science is way down the scale of authorities for them. We can see what authorities matter for the chief justice when he cites a 17th-century Dutch theologian as a guide to understanding human reproduction — in the 21st century! — and sprinkles his argument with carefully selected bible verses that have nothing to do with IVF, when all is said and done. This is pre-scientific, anti-scientific reasoning, and the problem is that they want to drag all of us back there.
@wdlindsy@bouriquet The six Justices that overturned Roe vs Wade are all Catholics so the question why is the Pope in charge of reproductive freedom in the United States?
@bouriquet@strong_sue Yes, I think his membership in Opus Dei is out in the open and hasn't ever been a secret. More than one member of the right-wing Catholic bloc on the Supreme Court is said to belong to Opus Dei, which is very much a secretive, powerful, wealthy, right-wing cult within Catholicism with anti-democratic, theocratic aspirations.
@strong_sue@bouriquet Thanks for the link. Betty Clermont has done good work on Opus Dei. Her book The Neo-Catholics has a lot of good information about it, and as someone who speaks Spanish as her first language, she is really equipped to read a lot of the formative literature about OD, which originated in Spain with strong fascist roots.
@wdlindsy@bouriquet There’s a lot more at that site. One quote “Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth – ‘holy discretion’ – and practice ‘divine deception,’” Robert Hutchison wrote in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei.
@strong_sue@bouriquet Good commentary. I recommend, too, the ODAN site — Opus Dei Awareness Network, which has a lot of good testimonials from former OD who blow the whistle on what the cult is about and what it does. https://odan.org
@strong_sue@wdlindsy@bouriquet Thanks for the link — yes, a right-wing Catholic bloc engineered by right-wing Catholic and Opus Dei member Leonard Leo with the full complicity of the US Catholic bishops. Though raised Catholic, Gorsuch is now Episcopalian.
@CptSuperlative I agree. When it comes to thinking about and understanding human reproduction and human sexuality, many of us are stuck in pre-modern paradigms, and those are frequently shored up by a certain kind of religiosity that's part of many folks' worldviews.